Online entities offer a wide variety of electronic content and services to a variety of different devices, including personal computers (PCs), electronic book viewers, portable digital assistants (PDAs), mobile telephones, pocket PCs, smart phones, and set-top boxes such as televisions, digital video recorders (DVRs), and gaming consoles. These devices often access various web pages and web services, such as those associated with online stores or other providers of audio/visual content, software programs, books, or other physical content.
For example, many online stores offer audio/visual content, software programs, books, or other physical content for sale. However, since online stores are accessed via web pages and web services, physical content is typically shipped to an individual by mail. Depending on the purchaser's physical distance from the online store's warehouse, the purchaser may not receive the physical content for several days or longer. While shipping may be expedited, increased shipping costs may reduce a purchaser's interest in buying physical content from an online store. Sales of physical content for online stores suffer as a result of mailing delays and expedited mail costs.
Conventionally, a purchaser does not have access to content between the moment of purchase and arrival of the physical content by mail. This undesirable consequence is particularly pronounced when highly sought after physical content becomes available for purchase. For example, highly sought after content is typically released at the same time in a geographic region, such as, a time zone. Potential purchasers or purchasers that may have pre-ordered a copy of the highly sought after physical content may congregate at a store at the release time to be one of the first to obtain access to the physical content. Since online stores typically do not have a store front or a physical location and delivery cannot occur immediately upon the release of highly sought after content, online stores are disadvantaged by set release times for highly sought after content.
In view of the foregoing, systems and methods are needed to overcome the limitations of providing purchasers of physical content with access to the content during undesirable mailing delays and immediately upon release of the content.